Euro / Sterling Dual-Pricing – A different angle

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I read with interest this piece from Conor Pope in Pricewatch on Monday morning regarding one of his readers observations about the dual-pricing that we experience in many stores at the moment.

A reader by the name of Helen was shopping in Wallis recently when she noticed they had torn off the sterling price, which had been attached to the price tags on the clothes along with the euro price – not the only shop operating in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK that has adopted such a policy in recent months.

“We all know that we are being ripped off in the Republic – the mark up between the sterling price and the euro price is blatantly obvious, even though the euro-sterling exchange rate has been trading consistently at around €0.78 for the past year. By tearing off the sterling price, does Wallis think that we won’t notice we are being ripped off?”

I was in a Boots store on Sunday where I saw a different perspective to this euro/sterling dual-pricing problem.

There was a small kid in the queue in front of me with some sort of Christmas present for his mother. He had his change counted out, and re-counted it a couple of times before he got to the top of the queue.

When he got to the cashier, he popped the gift on the counter, and unloaded his bundle of change for the cashier.

The cashier smiled at him, scanned the item, and asked him for €10.

“But it’s €8 on the label, I checked it myself” said the little lad, visibly gutted.

“No, it’s £8 I’m afraid. So that’s €10” said the cashier.

I don’t think we’re teaching our 6 and 7 year olds about dual-priced labels and exchange rates, are we?